


I Wrote Myself a Song

by sophinisba



Series: He Came to Meet Me [2]
Category: Lord of the Rings (2001 2002 2003), Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, F/M, Hobbits, Post-Quest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-14
Updated: 2008-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-05 21:50:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pippin and Diamond talk about singing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Wrote Myself a Song

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel to my story "He Came to Meet Me", written for Dana and inspired by her Pippin/Diamond fics and by the Hem song "He Came to Meet Me".

Pippin was tired after walking half the day, and Diamond led him back to Heather's family's home on the ridge, without letting them wander from the path this time, and they ate and slept there. Heather said she and Tolly would see to the animals so that Diamond could see to her guest. Tolly beamed and Diamond smiled, and Heather's look was happy, calm – it said that she'd leave them room to wander for now but she'd be wanting to hear the full story later on.

On the next day they walked back to the same marker stone and he kissed her again. And afterwards, when Pippin's lips were swelled but loose, and Diamond's were still hanging half-open, as if stung, Pippin told her some stories of his own. She'd heard some version of his adventure from Tolly and another from her father, but they were only rough sketches of what Pippin had to tell. Then he said, "I missed you, Diamond. I missed my home, but for some reason I thought often of you, and of Long Cleeve... Perhaps it was because of the loneliness."

And Diamond was still trying to understand how she'd gone from being herself to being this hobbit who kissed Peregrin Took under the far-away sky. "Yes?" she said, since she couldn't think of anything else.

"Yes," said Pippin, "when we were with the Orcs, and then later when we were in Rohan. Of course, everything was different as night and day, but if I could have thought of any place in the Shire – to make a frame for it, you know, in my mind, to stretch out towards it – I would think of this place. It was a hard land and a hard people. And there was a woman there, Diamond... well, she looked nothing like you, apart from..."

She'd been staring, rapt, not wanting to interrupt, and she thought this was a very awkward time for him to go quiet. "Yes?" she prompted again.

"Well, that you're both quite beautiful, though not in the _same_ way. Not your colouring and not your eyes and not the shape of your face or the set of your mouth."

"That, and she was human! I shouldn't think she'd look much like me!"

"Well, yes, but we got used to that after a time. We'd stopped paying so much attention."

"And you thought her beautiful."

"Please do not be jealous of the White Lady of Rohan, Diamond."

"I'm not," she said, and she meant it. Diamond didn't get jealous, but she was curious. "I'm only asking you to go on with your story."

"Ah, yes." He hesitated again, but when she looked at him pointedly he continued, "Well, what I meant to say was, she looked nothing like you, but she had rather the same way of standing in the wind."

"Do I have a certain way of standing in the wind then?"

"You do. You stand straight and strong. You look off in the distance and the wind tears at your hair and your sash and your dress, but somehow it doesn't seem to touch you."

Diamond thought about this. "But the last time you saw me was before I moved up here to the end of the Valley. I've got better at looking off in the distance and ignoring the weather since I've had to take care of sheep."

"Right, well." Pippin looked a little sheepish himself, Diamond thought. "That bit was just something I'd thought of now. And the truth is, Merry was the one who told me about Éowyn's way of standing in the wind. I didn't get to meet her until later, you see, in Minas Tirith..."

The names meant very little to Diamond, who had only very vague memories of even Merry and Frodo, but she did her best to follow along. At some point she'd stopped Pippin to make him explain a bit of the geography, and he moved some white rocks around on the ground, giving them unfamiliar names like Mindoluin, Moria, Minas this and that. It wasn't very helpful, really, but it was amusing.

"Merry was the one who fell for her then," Diamond said now.

"Well, perhaps, though I never did get him to come out and say so, not in those words." Pippin grinned, and Diamond released the shy smile she'd been trying to suppress, and the two of them sat in silence for some moments.

"All I mean to say is that I thought of you often. I think perhaps... Well, the Big Folk... not the ones who live in Bree, or anywhere near here, but the ones in the South, they have a kind of bearing, a dignity to them... and it's not that I don't think hobbits are dignified! But. Yes. I thought of you and your family. When Denethor asked me –"

"That's the one who'd met up with Frodo and Sam in the wild?"

"No, his father."

"The one who'd sit in the great hall and order people about." She could have said the one who went mad, but this seemed a little more tactful.

"Right," said Pippin. He was patient but also a little grim, and she wondered what that had been like, if she'd ever know him well enough to ask him outright. "Well, while he was ordering me about he asked if I could sing, but I wasn't at all eager to sing in that moment, or in that place."

"But why not, Pippin? I've always loved your singing voice."

Pippin brightened, clearly as susceptible to praise as ever. "Well, thank you!" he said. "But you know, I couldn't think at first of anything to sing for the Steward of Gondor. I could only recall walking songs and dancing songs, and above all else drinking songs. Only later I remembered some of the ones you'd taught me when I came here before. And do you know, when I was young I thought those notes of loneliness, of longing, could only really be sung properly in the North-farthing, with the wind and the pale sky and the treacherous ground."

"And the sheep," Diamond put in, smiling.

"Exactly! I reckoned it was all connected. But Minas Tirith is a great city with no sheep in it at all – at least as far as I saw – but when I sang those songs of yours, they echoed in that great hall, and they fit it perfectly."

He was looking into the distance himself now, and Diamond felt as if she could hear her own sad song on the air, and thought that someday she might teach it to him as well.

"I'm probably talking a lot of nonsense," Pippin said suddenly. "Forgive me, Diamond."

She shook her head. "I think I do understand something of what you're saying. I don't _think_ you mean to say that you've come for me because I remind you of the big women from the South and you'd really wanted to marry one of them."

Pippin grinned, shook his head, and Diamond smiled back and pretended she wasn't blushing after saying the word _marry_. "What I think," she continued, "is that I've known loneliness in my life. Sometimes I cursed it and sometimes I embraced it, but I've always had it near me. When you were growing up, you had your sisters and you had Merry and Frodo and all those other hobbits who... You never knew solitude until you went away from home. Pippin, I don't know that I'll ever understand this talk of yours or learn all the names," and she gestured toward the rocks made to stand for mountains, the sticks for towers, the pebbles for people, "but I can share your loneliness."

Pippin nodded slowly. "Maybe it won't be loneliness anymore, if we get to share it."

"Maybe." She felt less hopeful than he sounded. "Or maybe it'll still be that but... less frightening, somehow. Loneliness like an old friend."

"No way to know but to give it a try."

He folded her hand in his.


End file.
